Firewood tale

[Stegman]

Ran across this in Stratton Magazine and thought you guys would like it.

If you find it too difficult to read here, you can see it online at (broken link removed to http://www.strattonmagazine.com/fall/endless-conversation/)

(broken link removed to http://www.strattonmagazine.com/fall/endless-conversation/)

 

[TimJ]

Thanks for that Stegman

 

[muncybob]

I find a lot of that article true even though we are only entering our 5th year of wood heat. 60/yr YIKES.

 

[woodsman416]

Good story!

 

[mikepinto65]

Great story, i'll have to try and remember it when I start bucking and splitting my 4-6 cord this coming spring and feel like the logs arnt going anywhere lol.

 

[lazeedan]

Way to bring us back down to Earth!

 

[gyrfalcon]

Nice story. But as a Vermonter, I wonder about that word "billet." I gather it means rounds? I've sure never heard it used here. The 60 cords is a LOT even for a rambling, drafty old farmhouse. But many of the folks I've chatted with about wood heating here cite 20 or 25 cords as what they needed when they were growing up. (And people wonder why these folks don't do dry wood? Can you imagine doing twice or three times that much one year to get started, and that's in your spare time after the hard physical labor of farming.) Many switched to oil or propane, and then in recent years to pellet stoves rather than go through that again.

 

[My Oslo heats my home]

It was a nice story. Funny how firewood (and the process of c/s/s), stoves and fireplaces become part of folks way of life.

 

[blades]

Now when these 60 cord or so # pop up think about what they were burning in, open fire place , Ben Franklin stove, wood cook stove ( got to split smaller for that), and similar wood hog/smoke dragons of yore. Additionally most of this was cut and burn, only seasoning ( drying) was the time between css and into the appliance. If All I was useing for 24/7 heat was my wood furnace that would easily eat 10 cord or more in a season as the best it will do for usable heat is maybe 4 hours vs my NC30 which I load about 5:30am and get back to it about 12 hours later. house will mostly be above 65 at that point unless we are in the sub zero numbers. The NG unit is set to maintain 65.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Now when these 60 cord or so # pop up think about what they were burning in, open fire place , Ben Franklin stove, wood cook stove ( got to split smaller for that), and similar wood hog/smoke dragons of yore. Additionally most of this was cut and burn, only seasoning ( drying) was the time between css and into the appliance.

I know people who literally don't go out and cut down a tree and css their wood until they actually need it. Every few weeks during the heating season, they go up in the woods, take down a tree and process it, haul it back to the house and into the stove it goes. They live in a single-wide and have a 10-yo VC stove. Don't know how much they use a year, but far more than they need to.

 

[Lumber-Jack]

No doubt old Floyd Tobin also had to walk 50 miles to school and back when he was a kid (uphill both ways), in his bare feet, through blinding blizzards.
Seriously, I don't doubt that he may have processed 60 cord a year, but I doubt it was all burned in one family residence. Could be he sold it as a business?
Back in the old days they didn't try to heat the entire house to 70+ deg 24/7 like we do nowadays. Back then they were happy to heat the rooms they were in while they were using them. The kitchen/dinning-room was often the only place that stayed warm all day because the cook stove was going all day.

I know people who literally don't go out and cut down a tree and css their wood until they actually need it.

The trees that I cut are all standing dead and <20% MC, so I could do it that way except for one problem, SNOW!
The snow makes it a lot harder to access the trees with my truck, so I generally try to get all the wood I need for the winter in the fall before the snow flies. I fill up my wood shed, and then one last load, or part of a load, sits outside the shed in rounds, and we split that as we need it and burn it first, leaving the covered wood in the shed for winter burning.
I know it's not the acceptable way to do wood hoarding, but it works for me.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

That read like the typical article in a newspaper or magazine. Actually not much there except for authors who try to be romantic. Nope. Not much meat there at all. A bit of bull though...

 

[Chopernator]

Very nice!